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If you’re blogging for money (or just love) then connecting with the rapidly growing network of mom bloggers could open up new market or audience for you. Marketing Sherpa’s Special Report: Marketing to Moms will give you a feast of links and a run down on how corporates approach the world of online blogging mothers.
A 2008 survey or 2,350 women by BlogHer/Compass Partners found that:
- 53% women participate in the blogosphere
- 37% post comments to blogs
- 28% write or update blogs
- 46% have children at home
If the corporate approach leaves you cold - check out the report, you could still learn their efforts. And if you want to explore the blogging mom’s network you could make a good start with these top sites
The BlogHer Ad Network that reaches more than 8 million unique women each month through a network of more than 2,200 blogs and the BlogHer.com community hub: blogherads.com
If you’d like to know about blogging for money - not just a few lousy bucks…but a useful and regular $10,000 to $35,000 per month then check out Yarak Staros Blog Mastermind training. It’s a membership based training deal where Yaros shows you step-by-step, how to build your blog into a money spinner.
Yaros draws upon his experience with his blog Entrepreneurs-Journey.com - which ranks around 64,000 with Alexa. His blog combined with his Blog Tips Email Newsletter and RSS feed fetches a readership of over 250,000 bloggers and Internet marketers each month.
Not bad when you consider that Yaros started as an absolute beginner back in November 2004. You’ll find his sales pitch at blogmastermind.com (this isn’t an affiliate link).
Alternatives
An alternative to Yaros’s $97 per month membership deal, is the personalized coaching offered by Sherman Hu at shermanlive.com under Services. Sherman also offers a blog set up service.
Top Value with Jack Humphrey Jack Humphrey (this is an affiliate link) stands out as the best value if you want to learn about blogging or anything to do with monetizing a blog site. The Authority Black Book is the best source of free information on using social networking resources to add real grunt to your blog and his membership packages deliver top value for your buck.
You find a great A great “blogging how-to” tool in the Sociable plugin.
Want to automatically tell anyone and everyone at sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Email, and Facebook about your post? Then install Sociable straight away.
If you have problems installing plugins or want to know more about them please leave a comment and I’ll reply.
The Photo Dropper plugin for Wordpress lets you search Flickr for Creative Commons licensed images and then drop them into your post with just a couple of clicks. The images help you retain you readers interest and get them hooked into coming back for more.
As with all “simple” things in blogging, getting exactly what you want with Photo Dropper takes a bit of fine tuning.
Photo dropper gives you S, M & L photo sizes. And if you choose S or M, to get text wrap around photos - like in this blog, you need to tweak the HTML code. photo credit: audreyjm529
To place an S or M image on the left side (I’m using M images) you need to add the <class=”alignleft”> tag to the HTML code (if this doesn’t work you need to check the img tag in your theme style sheet) :
1. Switch from Visual to your HTML editor
2. Enter the class=”alignleft” tag in the code for the Flickr image source code. In the photo above this is:
<img src=”http://farm1.static.flickr.com/94/234554924_58b4c3bb9e_m.jpg” alt=”Hang Gliding” border=”0″ ENTER CODE HERE /> e.g.
Step 3. You can leave the rest of the code as is. Start writing the text to go beside the image above the image credit links - the image credits will line up under your image once you fill the space beside the image with text or line breaks (hit enter)
If you want to have an image aligned on the right side of your page its similar process with an extra tweak.
1. Switch from Visual to your HTML editor
2. Enter the class=”alignright” tag in the code for the Flickr image source code.
The extra step is to start the text that you want to show along side the image immediately after the HTML code for the image source - photo credit: tata_aka_T
and before the code for the photo credits.
So Step 3. Where to enter your text in the HTML code.
<a title=”Higher than Them” href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/12453467@N00/2459869991/” target=”_blank”> <img src=”http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2413/2459869991_8b54b86354_m.jpg” alt=”Higher than Them” border=”0″ align=”right”/>Start the text you want to show along side your image here e.g. in my blog “similar process with an extra tweak…”</a>
Step 4. Leave the HTML code for the image source and Creative Commons code at “absmiddle”. When your copy reaches the bottom of the image use the space bar to line up the image source link and Creative Commons logo with the image.
Step 5. Hit enter or shift/enter after the Creative Commons logo and start typing on a new line.
Step 6. (Optional) You can also add the rel=”nofollow” tag in 4 places (where ever there is an a=href tag to stop you leaking page rank e.g.:
<a title=”Higher than Them” rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/….
Other Tips
If you run a Commercial Blog, be sure to check “Show only photos that can be used commercially” in the Photo Dropper options. Andas you’re ultimately responsible for following Creative Commons licensing terms be sure to read them.
If you have several plugins the menu box for Photo Dropper (in Wordpress 2.5) can appear further down the page than SimpleTags and All-in -One SEO options - not right under the write post header as stated in the plugin intro. Also if you activate the plugin and nothing appears then uploading and activating the Flickr Manager plugin may help.
When I started online I wanted to know who I could believe about Internet marketing. So I profiled over 200 “experts” and slimmed them down to 120 that had good products, genuinely made money and had a solid reputation. One of the last I uncovered was Jeff Johnson - because he was pretty much under the radar until 2 years ago. And it is a case of saving one of the best to last…
Jeff would be among the top 10 experts that I’ve profiled because of his systems and because he gives genuinely valuable information free - like his code for RSS feeds for blogs. Jeff supplies the code for 19 top RSS feeds plus simple - really simple - step-by-step instructions for adding this code to your Wordpress or Feedburner blog. It literally took me 10 minutes to install. Once installed your blog readers can use any of those 19 feeds to subscribe to your blog.
I had one annoying question about blogging - how to add RSS subscriber feeds to my blog page. I bought Wordpress for Dummies and spent hours trying to get this info and Jeff supplies it all for free. Sure he’s trying to attract you to his membership site - and this code with instructions is a sample of one of a hundred he provides to members. You can get access to the code or sign on to his free subscribers’ list (my affiliate link).
Do good
Kerry Atma
For a bio on Jeff - or 120 other Internet marketing experts visit my website internet-marketing-pro-files.com
What is Google analytics? It’s a Google tracking system, that you install on a webpage, and it crunches out a report with stats such as the number of visitors to a page, the number who “bounced” off the page (meaning that page was the only page they visited before clicking away), keywords that your visitors used to find your blog, and which links on your page that visitors clicked on.
You can use all of these statistics to optimize the response rates to your blog. Simply change one thing - or more - about your page and the statistics will tell you if that change results in visitors staying longer on a page, whether you higher click through on links - and if you use the goal setting system in analytics, whether you succeeded in your conversion to sales goals.
Unlike a standard web page, you simply have to go through the same procedure as any other plugin to install Google analytics on your blog - download the plugin from Google analytics statistics, upload it to your Wordpress plugin file with your web host and then activate the plugin from your Wordpress dashboard. (For a standard web page you have to copy your HTML code from your Google account and paste it at the bottom of your page just before the tag).
Wishing you savvy blogging
Kerry Atma
If you’re looking for the right expert to learn how to sell online I’ve profiled 120 of the very best at internet-marketing-pro-files.com
If you want to try blogging for money then a great starting place is blog marketing and blog advertising site SocialSpark. Social Spark offers bloggers three opportunities to make money blogging.
* Sponsored Post…you can get paid $5 to $30 (usually $10 or below)to write posts for listed advertisers. Pick what you like to write about listed .
* Blog Sponsorship ..a banner advertising system, where advertisers on your blog typically pay $1 per day (ranges from 30 cents to $5.00 per day) for a pop-up text-based banner at the bottom of the web browser. This ad is displayed to every visitor to your blog over the duration of the blog sponsorship.
* Spark…essentially a Blog U Back marketplace where you can advertise for someone to boost your blog by commenting on it, while you return the favor, or you can pick up on someone’s request for a blog back.
Social Spark offers tracking of the buzz created by multiple blogging campaigns you create.
If you want to be able to grab videos from sites like YouTube and Flickr for your Moveable Type or Wordpress blog then check out a new plugin created by Magnify.net.
The “Magnify Publisher” plugin adds the power to simply drag and drop videos into your blog from over a dozen sites from your blog’s admin panel or resize them to fit. Definitely accessible for non-techies - try the demo
Not all are convinced that video on blogs are tne coming blog revoution. Are they a distraction as Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch suggests, or will the Web 2.0 juggernaut steamroll over the written word haven of blogging?
