In commencing work over the past month or so to revitalise this blog and the AdMastery.biz group of sites in general I’ve been developing a plan.  It wasn’t totally coherent to start with but gradually came into something like an intelligible shape.

Yesterday I came across an excellent blog post by Lynn Terry describing her approach to planning the future development of her main blog.  She’s much further advanced with it all than myself, but her approach fits so well with the way my mind works that I was delighted to discover that she’d also put it into pdf format for downloading. I could print it out and scribble all over it.

I was even more delighted when I found that not only was she was giving it away free but was allowing others to give it away as well.  So here it is – completely free, with none of  my affiliate links in it, and without even asking for an email address – a gift to my readers.  Enjoy it and use it. If you’re like me you’ll find it well worth the time and thought.

Download it here: Lynn Terry’s BlogBoost2010.

The effective life of a tweet on Twitter is considerably shorter than that of a blog post, which can give valuable service for months and even years.  Although it is true that a search of Twitter may find an old tweet the harsh reality is that for many, possibly most, of your followers a message will be there in front of them for a few minutes and then will pass into obscurity.  If they follow many people, and don’t look at their incoming tweets for several hours they may never see it at all.

Another reality is that the earth is round.  Not everyone is in daylight at the same time.  When I post a tweet in the middle of a UK morning my American followers will still be asleep whilst the Australians will have finished their day already and be preparing for the next night.

So without staying awake around the clock how am I going to reach them all.  This is where PostLater comes in.  I still do send out tweets on the spur of the moment as events occur and ideas hit me; but my more systematic tweeting is now managed largely by PostLater, on which I can set dates and times in advance – and not only for Twitter.

Yes, PostLater will handle full blog posts as well as micro-blogging. Some of the recent posts on this blog have been pre-written and scheduled on PostLater to appear at intervals. Of course, I could have scheduled them in WordPress, but a big advantage of doing it on PostLater is that I can easily see all my posting timetables in a single place. (This one is not being done that way as I’ll be sending it immediately; that flexibility is still there).

The links on this page are of course to an affiliate page, but in line with my normal practice I am not sending an affiliate link for something I’ve never used myself. PostLater is now an integral part of my blogs management structure. I recommend that if you’ve not already done so you check it out and see how it might fit with your blogging strategy and your ways of working.

There is no doubt that blogging can be a highly effective means of getting your message to your desired audience. But the challenge is to get your audience to your blog.

There are, of course, many ways of achieving this. Social bookmarking and networking, forum submissions, article marketing and many other approaches are powerful. However, good old fashioned SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) should never be ignored.

What does this mean? Put simply it means looking at your blog not as seen by a human eye but as a search engine’s robotic crawler will view it during its periodic visits. How can we do that?

I use a free tool called SEO for Firefox. As its name implies this is a plugin for the Firefox web browser. Its icon sits at the bottom right of my browser window and also in the Tools section of my top toolbar. It does many things, but for me the most valuable is its “SEO XRay”.

Open up an individual post of your blog in Firefox, click on SEO XRay and you’ll see an analysis of some key elements of that page, including what a search engine would find as its title, its description and its keywords. Unless you’ve already done what I’m about to propose, or something similar, I will guess that whilst the title will probably show as the title of your post you’ll find the description and keywords labelled “N/a” (Not available).

Now this is just not good enough. Search engines differ as to exactly how they use this information, and the importance that they give to it, but they all want to see it there. So how can we ensure that there’s something there, relevant to each individual page on your blog? It is, of course, very easy to go into the theme editor of a WordPress blog and add description and keyword content there. That will be better than nothing but the problem is that they will come up exactly the same for every post, and that is unlikely to be what you want as you deal with many different aspects of your blog’s subject area.

Enter Platinum SEO Pack. This is a plugin for WordPress blogs that allows you to specify what you want to appear in the SEO-critical fields. I’m not going to go into detail here on how it is set up or even the full range of its functionality. Go, get it, install it on one of your blogs, and see the difference. By the way, it works on WordPress blog pages as well as posts.

(Incidentally, the links above to Platinum SEO Pack and SEO for Firefox are non-commercial. I get no financial reward if you decide to use these utilities. This post is meant solely as helpful information).

I’ve been working today to revive some of the AdMastery.biz sites.  Some of them have been sadly neglected during my recent long period of weak health, and as I worked away it dawned on me suddenly that I’d never updated the name of this blog.

This has been done today and the banner above now reads, “The AdMastery Blog“. Several of my other related advertising sites are shortly to be brought consistently under the AdMastery banner. There are other developments planned for the coming months also – including things that according to previous plans should have been launched earlier this year, if only I had not been forced to take time off.

I’m intending to add posts here several times a week and to expand the coverage to assist small-scale internet marketing businesses much more comprehensively than in the past. In summary this blog will now be designed both to support users of the AdMastery.biz advertising services, and also to provide helpful content and references for people developing their knowhow in home-based internet marketing – including email advertising, various type of ad exchange, traffic exchanges and safelists, to mention just a few of the topics to come.

You may notice that traffic exchanges are mentioned there. Because the AdMastery.biz portfolio does not include a click exchange (as traffic exchanges are sometimes called) and at present it is not intended to launch one, I’ve never paid much attention to them here.  However, on recent reconsideration of their potential I’ve returned to using them considerably more myself and will therefore be referring to them periodically.  For example, you’ll find in yesterday’s post a brief note on my initial impressions of HitSilo, the new traffic exchange from Logiscape Technologies.

Also, given that this site is itself a blog, I’ll also include material on blogging and you can look forward to some changes in The AdMastery Blog itself. I’m hoping shortly to include a review of Alex Sysoef’s training programme for bloggers, “Expert Wordpress“, once I’ve been through the materials myself.

Wishing you success,

- David Murray -

Thanks to a tweet on Twitter I’ve just come across this excellent blog post from Darren Rowse at ProBlogger on three stages for shaping your own brand. Short and punchy. Yes, “punchy” in the sense that it hits you between the eyes and forces you to think, “Am I doing this? Or just pretending to?” – How to Shape Your Blog’s Brand.

Here is an excellent post on “Better Business Blogging“.  It recommends some very useful plugins under five categories:

1. Facilitating content sharing
2. Search engine optimisation
3. Onsite functions
4. Back Office
5. Comments

By the way, I don’t have any business relationship with the owner of that blog.  This is a genuine recommendation of a page that I believe many of my readers here should find useful.

- David -

Yaro Starak from Brisbane, Australia is an exceptionally successful blogger and his recently launched training course has now attracted more than 800 members. He earns enough from his blogging to have recently spent many months travelling around the world while constantly earning through daily blogging from wherever he happened to be at the time.

For some time he has had a free training course but recently, in collaboration with Gideon Shalwick, he launched “Become A Blogger Premium“. However, on February 6th the doors to this course will close.  Take a look at it now, and if you’re an aspiring blogger don’t miss this remarkable opportunity.  It won’t be there for long.

On many blogs you have to fight your way through a barrage of adverts to find any content, but today I want to point my readers to one on which there is no advertising at all.

Now I must make it clear that I have no objection to blog advertising. It would be rather hypocritical of me to say I was, given that this blog, like many of my others, quite unashamedly carries banners and advertorial content. No, it’s not an aversion to advertising but simply a question of what is appropriate to a specific blog with a specific purpose.

Jim Connolly lives just a few miles from me in the middle of England. We have never met in the flesh but often do so through Twitter and “Jim’s Marketing Blog”.

If you’re into blogging I suggest that you take a look at his article “No advertising or sponsors!“ and then ask yourself whether your present blog advertising strategy is the best for you. It will all depend on what you’re trying to achieve through your blog – but come to think of it, have you ever defined that clearly to yourself? If you don’t know precisely what you’re trying to achieve, how can you possibly know whether you’ve got the best advertising (or no-advertising) strategy?

I spotted on Darren Rowse’s “ProBlogger” today an item about the Huffington Post’s new book about blogging: The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging.

It reminded me of an incident a few years ago when I bought one of Arianna Huffington’s books, so I entered a comment on Darren’s blog which I thought might be interesting as a humourous aside here as well (although it wasn’t very funny at the time until it was over!).

This is what I wrote:

“I wonder whether this latest Huffington book will be as “explosive” as one I bought a few years ago. I was speaking at a conference in Los Angeles, and Arianna was one of the other speakers (a much more celebrated one than myself, I should add).  Anyway, after listening to her I was moved to buy her latest book.

“The trouble started at the airport, en route home to the UK, when I was stopped for having something suspicious in my bag.  I have to admit feeling more than a little worried; it was only a year or so after 9/11. Eventually after biting my nails to the core (figuratively speaking!) for about fifteen minutes they extracted Arianna’s book. The new lacquer coating on the paperback cover apparently was giving off an odour which the bomb detectors had picked up.

“On getting back home to the UK I wrote encouraging her to keep on writing “explosively”, but preferably stuff that can pass through an airport without my having to worry about possibly arriving in Guantanamo Bay rather than good old England.

“I’m looking forward to this latest output.”

Yesterday saw the launch of the latest edition of Rob Benwell’s blogging ebook, “Blogging to the Bank 3.0“.

Many Internet products and ebooks shoot like stars into the sky with highly promoted launches, and then just as quickly fall back to the ground never to be heard of again.

“Blogging to the Bank 3.0” is a demonstration of the lasting value of what Rob first put out over two years ago.    Not only have thousands of people bought the previous versions, and many of these made considerable incomes from implementing the recommendations, but Rob himself has continued to expand and refine his scheme.

This latest edition incorporates much of that continued learning.  It starts with choosing a topic and progresses through building the site, populating it with good content, promoting it, and even preparing to sell it if that’s what you eventually want to do.

At first sight it may seem to have similar content to other ebooks on blogging, but as I read it last night I realised quickly that this was written out of deep and deepening experience rather than being merely a rewriting of well-worn plr material such as is found in so many other places.

The main content is divided into ten steps, each with a short chapter , easy to read, and logically structured.  If I have one criticism at this point it is with the obvious lack of proof-reading.  Spelling mistakes abound.  One really irritating thing is the frequent confusion of similar words; “there”, “their” and “they’re” come to mind as one example of this, the three quite different words being treated almost as interchangeable.  Sadly this is commonplace in Internet material.  It is sloppy, and  personally I find it annoying but have to admit that it doesn’t detract from the intelligibility of the content.

Along with the main ebook come a number of other documents (as well as a couple of useful pieces of software).  The first “Blogging to the Bank” ebook is there, and also some later supplements.  It is in these that many will find content of which they disapprove.  There is a pdf file entitled, “White Hat Blogging Techniques” and another called “Black Hat Blogging Techniques”.

The first of these confines itself to fully ethical methods; the advice on interlinking of multiple blogs in an interconnected network is very sound.  It rejects the sometimes advocated method of building backlinks from hundreds of almost contentless sites which in any case now is counter-productive, at least with respect to Google ratings.

The second one contains ideas which Rob Benwell himself  admits many will not like and to do him justice he is quite open about this, simply saying in effect, “You can make a good income without these things; if you don’t like this part just miss it out”.  My own advice would be to read it, ensure that you understand what is being suggested, and then decide whether or not you feel comfortable with it.

Personally, for example, I do not like the idea of “stealing” blogs – even though legally it almost certainly is not theft it does seem to me to be taking undue advantage of someone else’s misfortune.  As I said before, the author’s position is, “I apply these methods, but if they offend your sensitivities, there’s no need for you to use them.”

A big difference between this latest version and the previous ones is the advice not now to use the Blogger or WordPress sites for free hosting of blogs.  Not only does that approach limit your design options but it puts the entire blog under the control of someone else – and Blogger now belongs to Google who in spite of their excellence in aother respects are not exactly noted for having a customer-friendly process if they suddenly decide to disapprove of a site (sometimes for no obvious reason).  Rather host your own blogs using the WordPress script, or one of the other blogging  systems such as B2Evolution, on your own rented server space.

In summary, this is 90%+ high quality content and well worth the $37 I paid for it yesterday.  I’ll be using many of the ideas that I picked up from “Blogging to the Bank 3.0“.