These are the mistakes that bloggers make when deciding how to phrase their work, deciding on topics for articles. General thematic mistakes that might not necessarily seem like mistakes obviously at the time (I’m not going to correct your spelling here) but that nevertheless might impact your reputation.

Read on for some examples of some of the shockers that a lot of people make when writing blogs.

Using the Plural

‘We here at ‘health bloggers.co’ are very interested in health and how it can impact the rest of our lives. Sounds okay sure, so what’s the problem? Well unfortunately many of the people using the plural in this way are not members of groups, organizations or businesses. In other words they’re pretty much just pretending at being a company when it’s actually one dude sat at home in his pants.

And the unfortunate thing is that everyone knows that. I’m sorry fella, but by writing ‘we’ you really aren’t fooling anyone. A blog owned by a large company will have several new articles uploaded a day, unique photos and a very professional web design. There is nothing wrong with being indie – in fact it’s quite hip to be independent these days. But that said, there’s nothing more amateurish than making out you’re a big organization when it’s plainly obvious that you aren’t. So don’t do it…

Avoiding Controversy

There’s a very successful blogger who writes about self development and general success. His name is Steve Pavlina, and his blog is actually very deserving of its success being a great read and regularly updated. I also like others like Zac Johnson and Pat. They work hard, create a personal brand and don’t shy away from controversies.

And part of the reason that the blog is so interesting is that it tackles some very interesting subjects and doesn’t shy away from controversy. Many people it seems are just too afraid to talk about subjects like religion, vegetarianism, politics etc because they don’t want to offend half their readers. It makes sense, but actually that then just leaves the blogs a lot less interesting than they could otherwise be. People don’t have to agree necessarily with your articles, but if you can generate some kind of emotional reaction then you are on to a real winner. If people are angry at what you’ve written then that’s good – because they’ll remember it for sure this way.

Writing Opinion as Fact

However you do have to make it clear that this is your opinion and not claim that it’s fact. At the same time you need to make very certain that you are certain on any facts that you do report – if you are sharing inaccurate information and someone notices then this will instantly make you look very amateurish and you will lose those viewers. There’s no surer way to make your blog look like it was written by a thirteen your old than to write nonsense and disguise it as fact.

Cyril’s work as a social media optimization consultant takes him to a lot of blogs and he believes that a lot more bloggers can be successful if they don’t make these simple mistakes.

Write something controversial.

If you write something that is shocking or goes against convention, there is a good chance that your readers will take notice. If you have thin skin, this type of post may not be for you, as the deluge of comments you experience may not be all positive, if at all.

Ask a question.

Craft a post that has a question for a title. Use the body of the post to propose some suggested solutions to the question, but make sure that you don’t definitively answer the question. Then, at the end of the post, you need to ask you readers to leave their questions in the comments.

Talk about a problem you are having and request help.

People love to put in their two cents about stuff, and if they can put in their input and be an expert, they are more than happy to help. Write about why your bread won’t rise or how you can’t get your nail polish to stop chipping. Whatever you choose to write about, end you post by asking the readers for their advice and their solutions to the problem.

Make up an award.

You don’t have to give an actual prize away, but this post type can get you quite a bit of attention. To do it, you should make up a category such as “Best Business Blog” and nominate some of your favorite blogs and explain why. Ask you visitors for their nominations and input, and you will most likely get it, especially if you blog in a strong, active nice.

Do something different.

If you usually write posts, think about posting some media like a video or an image. If you usually share media or other posts, write something up. Changing things up will get your visitor’s attention, and there is a good chance that your regular readers will ask you why you chose to change.

Conclusion

There is no way to guarantee that you get comments on your blog posts unless you pay for them or purposely bring on spam. These tips for writing posts that invite comments make no promises, but they are a great way to boost your odds of getting good, quality comments on your site. As you write, think of topics and approaches that your readers will have to comment on, things that are just begging for a response, and go with those to help better your chances for lots and lots of comments.

Written by Frederick, blogging specialist interested in design, social networks, flash templates and new technologies.

It’s not hard to catch the Page Rank mouse … you just have to bait your mousetrap with the right enticing bits for Google to gobble up. Most people think that the layout and the coding of your website is a major factor in deciding how Google ranks your site position. In fact, this is not true. The layout and codecs of your site actually has very little to do with Google ranking. If page optimization was that easy, everybody and their monkey’s uncle would be on Page 1 of Google.

Setting your Link Building Traps

Now let’s talk about the delicious online bait you should dangle in front of Google. The Google Page Rank mouse’s preferred bait of choice is Link building.

Statistically speaking, the more websites that are linked to your own website, the more appealing you become in the eyes of the Page Rank mouse. Google assigns every website with a rating from 0 to 10. The higher a website’s PR ranking, the more their trap slowly becomes a powerhouse.

Just like any other functioning mousetrap, you want to make sure your bait is fresh and of the highest quality. Here I am referring to the freshness of your website links. There are many factors that can affect link quality. The two most important are the anchor text within the link and site relevance.

Realistically speaking, it’s where your links are located on your site that determines their quality. For instance, links within the content body are far more valuable than links in the footer of the website.

How to Acquire Quality Links

Sometimes getting people to link back to your site is not the easiest of tasks. This is where the meat and potatoes of your website come into play.

Quality content needs to be provided to other website owners to make them want to link back to you! So the first order of business is filling your site with quality ingredients.

The second order of business is to obtain linkbacks to your website. How do you do this? One suggestion is to comment on relevant blogs and forums that are comparable to your site content. Be careful though, this can be time-consuming endeavor and not very effective if the blog or forum does not carry a high popularity rating online.

As a website master, you are in control of nabbing the page rank mouse and so the social media cats should be your best friend. Facebook and Twitter can help you chase down relevant webmaster contacts in order to ask them to link back to your site. Now get out there and hunt down that mouse with killer links and buzz worthy content.

Now that you know more about using the internet as your mousetrap to gain page rank, perhaps you might want to get more acquainted with creating a website. This guest post was written by Mary.

Blogging for business is a relatively new technique and it’s one that is taking some time for many businesses to get the hang of.  Starting a blog is easy, anyone can do it, and quite frequently anybody does.  However, what you tend to find with many businesses operating online is that their blog starts out great, begins to get a bit patchy, then tails off.  Sometimes after a silence of six months – an eternity in the fast paced world of the internet – a random, forlorn little post appears and then silence falls again.  If you are operating all or part of your business online, does the fact that your blog looks like a badly tended garden matter?  Should you be bothering at all?

What is a blog?

OK, it might be easier to start with what it isn’t.  A blog is nothing new – don’t let anyone fool you into believing that.  Martin Luther wrote one in the sixteenth century but due to the lack of high speed internet access he had to post it on some church door in Germany.  Luther’s blog set the world on fire.  He even followed it up with plenty of other posts, in the form of tracts, articles and letters.  Blogs have been around for centuries and some have been sublime, like Luther’s, while others have verged on the ridiculous – 19th century pamphlets for Quack Doctors cures for baldness being a case in point.  Blogs are basically propaganda and can fall into the spiritual, the political or the commercial categories.  Today, blogs are pretty much everywhere but that makes them no less powerful in the right hands.

SEO angles

From an SEO point of view blog posting helps to keep those pesky search engines interested in you.  Providing that content is relevant, updated and delightfully fresh, the search engines lap it up.  It’s only one part of an SEO strategy but it’s an important one.  In the real world you tend to head for the shop with the fresh coat of paint and the sparkly clean windows.  Not the one that’s half boarded up, has peeling paint and no signs of life inside it.  The same seems to apply to robots, in the not so real world.

Intangible assets

If Luther had simply posted the one blog and not followed it up with a lifetime of posting, updating and social networking, the world would probably be a very different place.  Poor Henry VIII would have had to look elsewhere for his justification for serial marriage, for a start.   Consistently maintained blogs, ones that don’t look a bit haphazard and ragged around the edges, offer the following advantages.

• They make your website look lived in, like it is open for business.  They also give the often overlooked, but crucial, impression that you actually exist.  Persuading customers that you really do exist in a virtual world is a big step toward gaining their trust.
• A well written blog, providing insightful and useful information about your industry is invaluable.  Customers turn magically into repeat customers when they know it’s a source of reliable, up-to-date information.
• It makes you ‘accessible’ – especially if you respond to comments.  Being part of a conversation is usually the best way to stand out in a crowd, and the internet is very crowded.
• You’re not just in it for the money.  You may well be, but best not to appear that way!  Writing a blog gives the impression that you are passionate about your specialist subject, which again encourages trust.

How much is that bloggy in the window?

So should you do it yourself or arrange for a professional copywriter to produce your blog?  If you have the time, the energy and the commitment to complete your blog daily, or at least several times a week, then go for it.  But the moment you find your commitment and energy tailing off, consider calling in a professional.  Blogs are ‘intangible assets’, the time you spend on them, or the money you pay for them, has no easily quantifiable return, which is perhaps why many websites neglect them.  The problem is, that if your blog is sporadic, your customers may well be to.

It used to be the dog in the window that got all the attention, these days it’s the blog in the virtual window.  But how much is it really worth?  When it comes to SEO copywriting and using copywriting services, it could well be more than you think.

As you continue writing your posts and your blog grows in popularity, however, you may find yourself running out of steam, and facing a case of writer’s (or blogger’s) block.  Annoyingly, this usually happens right as you’re starting to get a following, so you start to stress out that people are expecting regular posts, and you just don’t have the ideas to keep up.  Here are some ways to help keep your ideas flowing and your blog growing.

Keep Up to Date with Current News

Whether it is news specific to your industry or niche, or just news in general, keeping up with what is going on in the world and reading other people’s reports on it can give you loads of ideas.  Even if the theme of your site doesn’t lend itself to topical content, you may still find news or entertainment stories you can tie in to your subject matter to give a fresh angle.  When you write about news topics, think about something you can do to make it unique.  You can’t compete with major news outlets, so there’s not much to gain just by retelling a story, but you can offer opinion, speculation on how the news might affect your industry, or you can even be controversial and write an argument against the views expressed by a popular journalist covering the story.

Have a Rolling List of Topic Ideas

Chances are you come up with ideas, or at least the beginnings of ideas, all the time.  Keep a notebook with you and write down anything that comes into your head that might be useful, whether it is a full blown topic to cover or just an idea for a joke you might like to use somewhere.  You will be surprised by how quickly you fill it up with ideas you might have forgotten otherwise.  It doesn’t matter if you later decide the ideas were dumb and scrap them, it is about keeping note of the ideas you do have so when you come to write you have a base to start from.

Consider Series Articles

Think about a topic you can get a whole series of posts out of.  This can be a great way to get a lot of mileage out of one idea.  You may have seen people do those “30 day challenges” on their blogs, where they write about books, songs or movies, answering a different question with a post each day.  These are more for your casual, diary style blogger than your professional, but the idea is sound – by following a structure of this nature these bloggers have a whole month’s worth of ideas taken care of.  If you do a blog marketing weight loss products, for example, you could do the top 20 diet books, and write about a different one for each of the twenty posts.  A series idea can give you a lot of breathing space to build up your reserve of other post ideas, and will hopefully engage your readers so they want to read every post in the series.

If you think some time away from your blog would help to refresh your mind and the posts you create, why not contact Apple Copywriting and ask one of their copywriting services to write some posts for you for the time you are away.  Fresh content can help to engage new readers and maintain your old ones.

Here is the question that was posed by Rebecca Watkins

I have written many posts over the years about increasing comments on your blog.  Here are a couple:

How to get more blog comments

7 ways to Reward your blog readers 

I truly believe that the comment luv plugin is the single one thing that will have the most impact on increasing comments and engagement which will lead to traffic and conversions.

Since September I have been reading the buzz around the blogosphere from some of my blogging buddies like Hisham and Ditesco and deciced that Comment Luv Premium is just way to cool and useful to ignore.

For me, installing CommentLuv + is the first step for me to get more serious about blogging.  Over the past year I have not focused as much on my blogging projects because I have been busy with several other online ventures.  Those ventures are cruising on auto pilot now and I want to get back into blogging big time and I want to bring this blog to the top in the “helping small business and entrepreneurs through blogging and social media niche.”

I will be getting back on the commenting circuit and reacquainting myself with old friends and meeting new folks who have jumped into this space over the past year.

The best part of Comment Luv premium from my perspective is the built in incentives for readers to leave a comment.  I have tweaked my settings so if the reader wants a do follow link they must either Tweet, Like or Plus my post.  This also plays into anoher blogging goal I had for this year which was to get more focused on social media, specifically maximizing Google Plus.

Another awesome feature is the antispam technology that is built into the plugin.  This works to eliminate bot spam by adding a box that must be checked to confirm you are not a spammer.  This box uses javascript and bots suck at reading javascrit so this will work to eliminate almost all the bots out there.  Just yesterday, Andy added some features that combat human spam.  You can now set how many words a post must be, eliminating the “nice post bro” type of comment.  You can also set a certain amount of time that they must spend on the site before they can comment. .  This will eliminate those punks who just come in go right for the comments and preload one in and press send.  This will not work on my blog as I set the time for 30 seconds about how long it would take to read my posts.

I can go on and on about all the features but it would be best for you to get it straight from the horses mouth.

Here is a link (aff) to the Comment Luv Premium page.  Watch the video and see if it is right for your blog.

Oh, and don’t forget to leave me a comment.

Here are the 6 Most Popular Ad Networks for Bloggers

Google Adsense

This is the behemoth of the ad world.  You can find Google Adsense on just about every blog, forum, or static website.  Not only do they serve most countries, but they have the best payouts too.  The Adsense network is the network to be in, period.  As your blog grows your Adsense revenue will grow as well.  Over the past 3 years I have made tens of thousands off dollars just with Google ads.

Chitika

If you don’t have traffic from the USA or Canada then don’t bother using Chitika.  It isn’t for you.  They don’t want traffic from foreign countries due to the low payouts and high-fraud clicks.  I do however recommend them as a substitute for Adsense.  That is, if you can’t get on Google Adsense for some reason or another.

Adbrite

Probably one of the bigger networks.  Most people would actually recommend using Adbrite over using Chitika.  They usually have a solid amount of advertisers, but you may not always have ads running.  For that reason it’s up to you if you use them or not.  When you do have ads they usually do pay pretty well.  Adbrite isn’t as good as Google Adsense but it does work and it does pay.

Bidvertiser

This company is pretty horrible.  I only recommend using them if your site is low in traffic and you don’t mind the random ads you get.  They aren’t great at targeting and they don’t have great advertisers.  In my opinion, this is a last resort but I guess it works for some folks because they are a major player in the ad world.

Tribal Fusion

You can’t get into this network until you have a specific amount of visitors and page views.  This network comes recommended by a few top bloggers.  All up to you.  Once you meet their requirements you can try them out.  Check out their requirements page as they tend to change every so often.

Kontera

Kontera has a ton of options for ad displays.  This makes it highly recommend for medium sized websites.  When I say medium I mean decent amount of traffic and page views.  I always recommend split testing ad networks to see which one performs better for you.  Kontera is the choice of many bloggers, maybe you too?

Finding an ad network that is good for your blog takes time.  If you can get into Google Adsense, then do so.  Adsense is the best for most blogs, but you could of course go into private selling.  All niches are different and they all have different types of advertisers.  It’s all about finding what works for you.

What ad networks work best for you?

The List of Best Things

This type of blog post is a lot like reviewing something.  A lot of people don’t have the time to try and research every possible option.  The next best thing is to have a pre-ready list of services or products that will help out your reader.  This can also bring you some nice contacts from owners and companies that serve these products.  Expect emails thanking you or blog post comments from business operators if you have a solid foot hold in the industry of your blog.

The Resource List

Everyone needs resources and tools.  So why not make a list that offers it to them?  The best resources you can offer are free ones.  You can also list paid ones if you feel that they are worth your readers money.  However, I wouldn’t list paid products or services that you personally haven’t tried -especially if you have a good reputation for being reliable.

Showcases

The internet is large and vast giving your average reader too much for too little of time.  Showcasing other’s work and skills is a good way to get your readers inspired.  There is nothing like seeing other people’s success to fuel your ambition.

Short Tutorials

Quick and simple tutorials for any type of product, service, or niche related to your blog is applauded.  I haven’t seen many blogs not offer tutorials on one or two things related to their subject.  Why not be the first to offer it in yours?  You can even take it a step further and create a video tutorial for the topic rather than a written one.

Answering

Start answering people’s questions and show off.  If you feel like you know enough about your subject to help others, then do so!  I would hope that you do if you own a blog about it. . . Nothing helps you more than being able to help others.  It creates a trusting relationship.  You know the answers and they come to you for help.  That’s the best type of blog you can have.

Feel free to expand on the types of blog post formats in the comments.  I would love to hear from you.

So what should your viral ebook be about? Well, if you want to bring “targeted” traffic to your blog, your viral ebook needs to be related to the subject of your blog. And if you actually want the ebook to go viral, it needs to be BOTH bizarre and extremely useful. In order for the ebook to be bizarre, it needs to somehow tie in with a subject that some people believe to be taboo while still staying on-topic. In order for it to be extremely useful, it needs to be somewhat of a black book with information that most people don’t know about. Combine the two together and you could have a winner. Some people might say that extremely useful would be good enough. In some cases it would be. But it’s really hard to get people to talk about your viral ebook if it doesn’t fall into those two categories.

Once you have your concept down, you’re half finished so pat yourself on the back. All that’s left is the actual writing of the ebook. Don’t worry. You don’t need expensive software to create your viral ebook. In fact, most viral ebooks are nothing more than a simple PDF file. The best software to create a PDF-style ebook can be downloaded at www.OpenOffice.org. After you install this application on your computer, you’re going to need to open the Open Office Writer. This program works in the exact same way as any other word processor. Write your ebook and once you’re finished, click on the PDF icon which is on the top of the page. Wallah! You’re finished and your ebook is ready to be distributed.

But what if you want a much nicer ebook? Simple. All you have to do is find somebody who can create an ebook cover for you. Prices vary but most designers will create a professionally-designed cover for $50 or less. Not all designers are created equal so take your time. When the cover is finished, add an image of the cover within your ebook on the first page and save it as a PDF file. Now your ebook has a face that more people will notice.

Now it’s time to distribute your viral ebook. While there are many ways to do this, the first way I would suggest you promote it is by contacting other blog owners with related blogs. If they like it, they’ll blog about. And if other people follow their blogs, they’ll blog about it too. Let’s not forget all the social bookmarks you’ll get from the people who visit those blogs. If you’re lucky, you’ll get lots of people talking about your ebook and your ebook might even be mentioned in some book one day on how viral marketing should be done. Wouldn’t that be something!

This was Guest Post submitted by Greg Davidson.  Check out his site at Script Package.