Trust is a big word right now in the internet. Everyone is talking about being open and honest, transparency and a willingness to lay it all on the table. You’ve got to be seen as trustworthy before you can expect anyone to listen to you. Earning trust isn’t as simple as just telling people they can trust you. You’ve got to earn it. You have to know exactly what people need before they can start trusting you. Show them your expertise. People will trust other people who know what they are talking about. Make...

photo credit: Foxtongue Welcome back to my list of writing helpers. If you haven’t yet, check out the first four sources of blog content in part 1. Now I’m going to take you through the last four ways that you can feed great content into your blog without spending hours writing it. 5. Add RSS News Feeds As you probably already know, most blogs have what is known as an RSS feed. This is where, when set up by the blog owner, readers can subscribe to the feed and be notified of new posts to the blog via email or feed...

photo credit: striatic You know your blog needs content to stay alive. Your readers demand it, most search engines demand it, and frankly it’s not really a blog if you never add anything to it.  But what if you’re just not a writer? Maybe you know how to pick the best food for show dogs, but just lack the ability to write it all out. Or maybe you just don’t have the time or energy to post more than once a week, but you know your blog needs to be updated more often than that. Don’t worry! You can still...

Whether it is to shop online, to book a plane ticket, to check movie schedules, or to pinpoint your current location via GPS, the Internet has become a one-stop shop for almost all the needs for daily activities – and then some. And yet, despite all functionality many websites and blogs can offer, there are still a huge number of sites that simply do nothing but take up space, particularly on a search engine results page. What happens is that even with the most stringent of filters employed by powerful search engines, Internet...

photo credit: mugley You can have a great blog on the internet, a wonderful blog, one that shares within its posts the secrets to infinite happiness and joy. And none of that will mean a thing if no one knows it is there. That, my friends, is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in. If you want people to be able to find your blog, it is important is that you have good SEO. Whenever you put one or more words into a search bar to look for something, the SEO of a website is what helps bring up those websites. And the...

photo credit: victoriapeckham A successful blogs depends on returning visitors. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. You need to keep your visitors coming back to your blog. Try these methods: 1) Promote commenters Give your commenters a reason to keep returning and talking by giving them a shout out. Point out great comments your visitors make and include a link back to their...

photo credit: *ejk* What is RSS? You probably have seen this three-letter acronym in the course of your internet surfing. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary; syndicating means republishing an article that comes from another source such as a website. The original idea of RSS came from Netscape, where their intention was to provide a way for users to customize their personal homepage to contain links to websites that interest them, similar to bookmarking websites. RSS now is a way of publicizing updates...