Learn how to make money online!

No matter if you are just starting out or have been bogging for while now, reading this would help you a lot. When you post an article, you have to choose a category associated with it (Taxonomy in Expression Engine). Let’s say that you have written an article on Xbox 360 and that you are comparing it with PlayStation 3. I am sure you will have these 3 categories in you blog i.e. Gaming, Xbox, PlayStation. Normally you would go ahead and select all 3 categories for the article but this is where you would be making a mistake.

Always associate one article with one category, this way you can easily avoid duplicating content on your blog which is frowned upon by search engines such a Google. In the above example, the best category to choose would be Gaming.

This poses another question, what happens to people looking for Xbox & PlayStation… they won’t get to see the article because it is not in those categories! This is why you need to use TAGS in your blog. You can have multiple tags per article which makes it different from a category. Tags are keywords from your article which you think would be instantly recognized by visitors on your blog, thus making it very easy for them to find the right content.

If you running a WordPress blog and using different affiliate programs to make money then I is a good idea to Cloak all the outgoing links. Cloaking is simply hiding the affiliate links so that they cannot be tampered with and your sale is not compromised.

This simplest way to do is use the awesome Link Cloaking Plugin, move your mouse over the link and look at the status bar, you will see how the cloaked links looks like.

The plugin is very simple to Install, the instructions are right there on the blog. The one very useful feature is that when you cloak the link, it automatically adds the nofollow tag so that you keep your link juice intact.

Important Note: If you are using SEO urls, i.e. mod rewrite on your blog, then you will have to go to Settings > Permlink Settings and simply press “Save Changes”. This will update your .htaccess with the Cloaking code. This has to be done everytime you upgrade WordPress.

If you are a regular at forums then you would know this already but if you are not I would suggest you to join a couple forums of your blog’s niche and start taking part in discussions there.

Most of the forums let you have a couple signature links added everytime you make a comment, not only will this help pass on some link juice to your blog but also help you rank better on your keywords. Forums these days also let you add RSS feed to your profile. If you are an active participant on forums then you will see many referrals coming your way from these links.

Follow some basic ethics while making signature links at forums.

1. Do not link to under construction pages, or blog which have very little content. Wait till you have about 20-30 good articles and then go for the signature links.
2. Do not make a link with 6-7 different keywords as it will do more harm than good.
3. If you add 2 link, they should be of different domian… It would not be good to add 2 links with different titles but same domain. Search engines are much to smart for that.