I Didn’t Start El Fuego, I Just Got Burned
Why this blog is here….don’t worry I’ll get straight to the point…in a couple paragraphs or so…
We have all been up late battling insomnia and endured the top to bottom infomercials hawking everything from make money with _____ , to the latest totally awesome amazing wonder cleaner that will shave hours from your cleaning tasks. There is never a shortage of someone trying to make money by selling you a way to make money. So it is in the blogging world. I didn’t start the fire…I just got burned…
There is no shortage of turnkey systems that will show you how to make thousands monthly, weekly, even daily. There is no shortage of people out there selling a way to make money blogging. There are hundreds of blogs out there, with more popping up daily, blogging about blogging and how to make money doing it. You have the big boys like ProBlogger, Shoemoney, and John Chow dot com. There are the solidly upper middle class, no offense meant, blogs like 45n5.com, John Cow, Zac Johnson, and Nate Whitehill. Then you have the small fries like ProfitableProductiveBlogging.com, which by the way cman, is a horrendously long URL, to the cleverly named Make Big Money. Maybe Cman should write an article about how to make money with a ridiculously long URL no one will ever type. Sorry nothing personal…He did supposedly earn almost $1500 from blogging in January…do you think he was serious?
I just want to ask you a question. Have you been “burned” by an ASOTV product? Have you purchased a “make a million dollars on the Internet” package only to forget to demand your money back within the “60 day money back” period? I know I have. I will admit publicly that I have purchased a few of these make money e-books.
What did I get for all of my trouble? Not much. What I should have gotten was a t-shirt. The t-shirt would say….”I tried making money online and all I got was this stupid t-shirt.” Okay so I have actually made money online but I’m not going to tell you how much (at least for now), nor am I going to blog about how that you too can become an Internet millionaire.
The intent of this blog is to be an experiment. I won’t lie I also wouldn’t mind it making some money too but that is just an aside. I am going to directly put into practice what the ProBloggers, Shoemoneys, and John Chows of the blogosphere say will make a blog a success. I will even give the old college try to the tadpoles in the industry like the aforementioned cman and the camouflaged Standout Blogger. What I want to do is to take the advice, the free ebooks they offer, the tips and tricks, SEO ideas, traffic building recipes, and all the rest, break them down, put them into practice using this blog and report to you the real life results. They post what to do…I simply follow what they say. I try it out and see if they really do know of what they speak.
In other words…does it work…or are we all just getting burned?
Linking Your Blog Posts To Each Other
Internal page links are an area over which you have complete control yet many people don’t pay enough attention to them. You have the greatest control over links from within your own web site so take advantage of that control. Sometimes it is hard to control how others link to you, but you can always do a good job of providing great links to yourself using internal site linking.
Here are some rules to follow when creating your Internal Page Links.
Make sure that the anchor text for you link is relevant to your target page
Whenever it is possible use words similar to those expressed in the title of the target article or page you are linking to. Make sure the anchor text is relevant and that the link title and the title of the article, post or page match the main keywords of the target page. Having a few of those ubiquitous “click here” links scattered around might make you look a bit more natural, but for the most part your links should describe what is on the other end of the link. For example if I wanted to link to one of my previous posts about En Fuego Blogging - Blogging From Fire & Passion I could type in a link that looks like this.
Read my post En Fuego Blogging - Blogging From Fire & Passion here.
I am always surprised by the number of links I see still being done this way. It would be better however to use the title of the post which includes good keywords as the anchor text for the link. Here is the way I think it should be done.
Read my post En Fuego Blogging - Blogging From Fire & Passion.
This type of linking has a large impact on how you will rank for keywords. The more you link internally using specific keywords and to relevant content the higher you will rank for those keywords.
Use the title tag and use the main keywords from the target page
The title tag in a link is not as important as the anchor text, but many search engines still place quite a bit of weight on it. You can also make up a teeny bit for a “not-so-hot” anchor text with good title keywords.
Example:
<a href=”http://enfuegoblogger.com/”
title=”En Fuego Blogger”>the web page</a>
Internal linking when done right will not only boost your standing for your keywords but also will encourage people to continue reading other content on your site. When posting on a topic that you have posted on in the past you should always include link(s) back to your previous posts. When people start clicking links on your site they move from being simple readers to being actively engaged in your sites content.
En Fuego Blogging - Blogging From Fire & Passion
Who are you? What kind of a person are you? What are you hobbies and interests? What are some things you are en fuego about? The reason I am asking is that in my experience the people that do the best and actually stick with and put in the work and time necessary are the ones that blog from their personal experience. I might get in trouble saying this, but it isn’t simply put up a site and make big bucks tomorrow. I know there are a lot of people out there selling and hyping some product or system that will make you a dot com blogging millionaire overnight. I’m not knocking them. I’ve even bought a few of them. Almost all have great ideas, strategies, techniques, and software that can help you in making money blogging and with affiliate marketing.
Bottom line though is that it takes time to write quality content. Just a quick tip, post as much original content as possible and very little pre-written articles. It takes time to build relationships with other bloggers. It takes time to build links both incoming and outgoing. It takes time to build a reputation.
There are soooo many that start this thing up and then quit a few months later. You can make good money online through blogging and affiliate marketing but you have to endure through the crappy times. Sounds very cliche I know but believe me there will be some times you don’t feel like blogging in the slightest and want to quit because you aren’t seeing a return. Those are the times when having something you love something you are passionate about, something that is more personal helps immensely.
