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.

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).

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“.

I didn’t jump on the BlogRush train when it left the station a year or so ago. Maybe that was a mistake because it was a great idea. However, today John Reese pulled the plug on this service after experiencing insoluble technical difficulties over many months. A shame really, but the right thing to do in the circumstances.

More about this at John Chow dot Com.